Did You Know / Did You Care #4

Nancy and I were surprised to see this field while driving near Mesilla, N.M., a small town that borders Las Cruces. It’s cotton. Did you know / did you care that New Mexico produced 71,500 480-lb bales of cotton in the production year that ended May 1, 2021? Where does New Mexico rank among all cotton-producing states? Not very high. Texas led all states with 4.75 million bales in 2020, and then it dropped off quickly: Georgia had 2.18 million, Arkansas had 1.3 million, and Mississippi had 1.2 million. The no. 10 state, North Carolina, had 540,000 bales – 7.5 times as many bales as New Mexico in 2021. Still, it’s kind of neat to see cotton fields in the desert. We’ve since also seen them south of Deming, N.M., just a few miles north of Mexico. (Apologies for the blurry photo; as I wrote, we weren’t expecting to come across a cotton field.)